Can you walk us through the damage track of an ego hosted in a vehicle? Let's say a character named Fred sleeves into a vehicle with 100 durability; it has 50 durability for ego purposes. Is the wound threshold 10 or 20?
What about death rating? Is Fred still alive after 299 total damage, or does Fred die when his damage exceeds the death rating based on the ego durability?

I noticed that the current write-up for swarmanoid propulsion in space only lists gas jets and rockets. Why wouldn't they be able to use electric, ionic, or magnetic drives? Being so small, they're just like the the test systems used at NASA (moving a gram or two) right now. These drives are overall less powerful than rocket engines, but use minimal (or no) fuel.

In the other thread, the non-open discussion for Extreme Morphology, I was moving on to the topic of lore and fact in the setting of Eclipse Phase, but the devs want to keep things in that thread on topic. I decided to move a number of examples I wanted to use there here before I started to ramble off-topic. I'm not sure if this is the proper place for this, but I'll post it here for the time being.

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*Ahem*. As a GM for a futuristic hard sci-fi RPG, I want keep things realistic. Some of the fun of this game *I think* is using future technology to fix potentially real problems. Unfortunately, there some problems that I'm required to make a judgement call on when I lack sufficient information. Unfortunately, searching the internet does not always provide me with the information that I'm looking for. I would find it handy to have more lore and real facts in the rule books that would allow me to address some of these problems. I'm listing a few problems that have come up and some of my conclusions.

Problem #1 - The augmentations, Enhanced Respiration and Respirocytes. In regards to holding your breath, I assume that Enhanced Respiration can do that by increasing red blood cell count (you see increased red blood cell count in people who train and practice to break world records when holding their breath under water). However, Respirocytes occupy space in the blood. Because this may lead to competition for space in the blood, I assume that respirocytes wins out, because being able to hold your breath for 4 hours is better than holding your breath for 30 minutes. I currently rule that using both augmentations together only provide 4 hours of oxygen since the extra red blood cells were removed to provide optimal room for the artificial red blood cells.

Problem #2 - The augmentations, Temperature Tolerance and Vacuum Sealing. Temperature Tolerance provides protection from temperatures ranging from -30 C to 60 C. Vacuum Sealing provides protection from -75 C to 100 C. It seams to me that Vacuum Sealing provides better protection, so I'm left wondering if there is ever a reason why you would pick both augmentations if given the option. Actually, I'm still a little confused by the entry on (core rulebook, p. 143) that mentions that synthmorphs have increase environmental resistances, so they should be treated as though they had both Temperature Tolerance and Vacuum Sealing. Why mention both if one is clearly better than the other?

So, I think the problem with players using vehicles as morphs is that vehicles don't really do durability so well. To illustrate, I'll use the aircar from Sunward and our standard anti-vehicle weapon, the standard HEAP missile.

The aircar has a DUR of 150 and an armor of 20/10. The seeker launcher, assuming it hits, does 6d10 + 24 damage with an AV of -8, for a total average damage per shot of 54 damage per shot. That's three anti-armor missiles that the thing can eat before it "can no longer transport passengers and cargo". I think that, by itself, is unreasonable.

There are a couple of ways of handling this. One way, I think, it so have blast weapons do terrible, terrible damage to larger objects. This is a way of 'simulating' the larger object being made of multiple smaller objects with a cumulative durability that is very high. This is actually very relevant for morphs, particularly things like Flexbots, where joining ten different DUR 30 bots together shouldn't cause them to take 1/10 the total damage damage from a grenade going off in the room.

Incidentally, I did have a player in a game want to be a vehicle morph. I went with it, but we never really hashed out all the mechanics before the game fell apart for unrelated reasons.

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This isn't a war ordinary humans can win. This is the future. Death's an inconvenience, now. Nothing more.

The problem with vehicles as morphs isn't something I think can be fixed simply by saying that they stop supporting an Ego at half the listed DUR. For one, the fluff text describing why this happens is inconsistent with the rules for what happens to synthmorphs exceeding their DUR. By the core rules on p. 207, accumulating more damage than your DUR in a synthmorph simply means it's physically disabled, and mental actions can be taken as normal just fine - whereas these new rules say that after DUR damage has been exceeded, the systems capable of running an Ego shut down.

Especially when we consider that an Ego can run on an Ecto, which is the size of a credit card, it seems rather odd that damage to a vehicle's structural integrity means it has to stop running an Ego. (It also allows for a very simple exploit; tape an Ecto with an infomorph in it to the underside of the dashboard, and jam the vehicle.) This is especially cogent given that vehicles don't come standard with cyberbrains; someone had to specifically take their time to install one, and decided that for whatever forsaken reason, they'd make it hibernate the Ego long, long before the vehicle is actually broken.

This is one way to stop vehicles from being the toughest, most powerful morphs available, but it ignores the uplifted pachyderm in the living room; vehicles are for some odd reason statted up to be the toughest, most powerful morphs available.

The Mars Buggy, for example, which is described as an ubiquitous all-terrain vehicle - yet somehow, it's capable of taking more anti-tank rockets to the face than a Reaper, and is almost as well armoured as one. If we instead imagine, say, an average sedan, an anti-tank rocket should reduce it to a smoldering husk, and it shouldn't have more armour than a bullet-proof vest without armour-plate inserts.

In short, I see the solution to the powerful vehicle-morphs issue not being to nerf the powerful vehicle-morphs, but rather to nerf the powerful vehicle-morphs.

There are lots of different options. A general decrease in vehicle durability is probably necessary, but more than that is required to make anything fit together. There's the damage multiplier effect for explosives as a rough heuristic for "multiple systems on the same vehicle being damaged", but you also fleshing out the "called shot" system to give non-houserule effects for weapon attacks on specific targets. If you're getting more detailed than that, giving individual subsystems for vehicles (and larger morphs) their own durability gives you lots more options for a relatively moderate complexity penalty (and this would avoid the need for a damage multiplier effect, because you could just do the damage to all the relevant systems).

—

This isn't a war ordinary humans can win. This is the future. Death's an inconvenience, now. Nothing more.

I too agree with LatwPIAT, the Eclipse Phase system simply doesn't represent anti-vehicular weaponry and damage all too well. Either one of two things needs to happen:

Anti-vehicular weapons need a damage multiplier to represent that they are more lethal to non-combat vehicles than normal weapons, while not being significantly more dangerous to smaller combat morphs.

Vehicular weapons need to deal damage to passengers within a non-combat vehicle upon merely hitting the vehicle, so that a vehicle can be neutralized by the death of its passengers easier than by completely annihilating the vehicle.

The former makes sense if you want vehicles to be destroyed by vehicle-scale damage easier, while the latter makes sense if you want to represent "destroyed" vehicles as any instance where a vehicle is taken out of combat, including the mere death of its crew/passengers/driver. I'd recommend the former, with perhaps an x2 to x3 multiplier for damage to non-combat vehicles.

I would like some rules on combining swarms with it. Can they hitch a ride on or in the microbots? Does that slow them down?

Can stuff like covert operations tools and hives be split over several microbots that meet at the target, or do you need a larger bot to carry them?

How much can guardian angels and creepies carry? They're obvious gear carriers. Can they have and fire weapons? A general system for adding mobility to gear so it could move on its own and "use itself" would be good to have, not just for swarmanoids.

I too agree with LatwPIAT, the Eclipse Phase system simply doesn't represent anti-vehicular weaponry and damage all too well. Either one of two things needs to happen:

I'd think scaling down the DUR and armour of vehicles would be a better fix. DUR represents, largely, how easy something is to disable, and most vehicles are really easy to disable - you can just shoot them through the engine block with an assault rifle. So reducing DUR and armour would make both anti-armour weapons and normal firearms more effective against vehicles.

Alternatively, a whole system for handling morphs consisting of largely independent subsystems could be introduced. Your average sedan consists of a rather robust chassis and is a large target (+10), but it also has a vulnerable engine (DUR 10, armor 6/6) that is a small target (-10) and several extremely vulnerable wheels (DUR 5, armor 0/0) that are very small targets (-20). Passengers are armoured by a 3/4 rating from the sides (car doors), a 6/6 rating from the rear (boot), and a 16/16 rating from the front (engine block).

A burst of automatic rifle fire that doesn't hit an engine, passenger or wheel can be considered to have done largely cosmetic damage, while a HEAP missile that doesn't hit an engine, passenger or wheel will explode and deal avg. 57 DV to each subsystem before armor. (Which in this case will probably reduce the sedan, its engine and its wheels, to a smoldering husk.) A general DUR stat could be given to the chassis for determining whether it's worth trying to repair the car.

A Consortium IFV would have an extremely robust chassis with heavy armour values, but its subsystems would include the turret (also robust and well armoured), the autocannon, coaxial MG, missile launchers, pintle-mounted, remote-controlled machine guns, and tracks.

Whoever are wearing a vehicle as a morph would be fairly well protected from damage to themselves, but would still be at a risk of losing valuable subsystems (such as the loss of an engine meaning that they simply can't move, although they can still do mental or mesh actions without penalty).

most vehicles are really easy to disable - you can just shoot them through the engine block with an assault rifle.

No you can't. Engines are very hard to disable. In the army I was taught to go for the driver and ignore the vehicle, it could take 100 bullets or more to stop it with rifle or LMG fire. You have to get really lucky to hit something vital. Of course the engine might not be able to drive longer distances, but disabling it outright isn't likely. Even .50 HMGs have to hit the right part of the engine, and they may even go for igniting fuel with incendiary ammo rather than destroying the engine directly, but I was in recon and we didn't use .50's.

In EP, it could be even harder. Cars could have individual electric engines for each wheel, battery cells are redundant, etc. There may well only be very few individual components that would cause the vehicle to fail.

I'd think scaling down the DUR and armour of vehicles would be a better fix. DUR represents, largely, how easy something is to disable, and most vehicles are really easy to disable - you can just shoot them through the engine block with an assault rifle. So reducing DUR and armour would make both anti-armour weapons and normal firearms more effective against vehicles.

That isn't true at all. While a bullet in the right place could disable a vehicle, putting a bullet in the right place actually takes a lot of skill, especially depending on vehicle speed, orientation relative to the shooter, and other factors. An anti-vehicle rifle doesn't magically disable any machine it passes through... it has to pass through the right part of the vehicle to pull it off.

Besides, simply reducing DUR doesn't take care of other aspects of vehicles that actually make sense in the Eclipse Phase mechanics. Like the fact that I can't really disable a vehicle easily with melee weapons. At best, even with the best melee weapons that might exist, I'm probably only going to do cosmetic damage unless I can punch through the metal exterior and start cutting through the good stuff. So most non-monofilament melee weaponry should be trivial in anti-vehicle capability at best.

LatwPIAT wrote:

Alternatively, a whole system for handling morphs consisting of largely independent subsystems could be introduced. Your average sedan consists of a rather robust chassis and is a large target (+10), but it also has a vulnerable engine (DUR 10, armor 6/6) that is a small target (-10) and several extremely vulnerable wheels (DUR 5, armor 0/0) that are very small targets (-20). Passengers are armoured by a 3/4 rating from the sides (car doors), a 6/6 rating from the rear (boot), and a 16/16 rating from the front (engine block).

A burst of automatic rifle fire that doesn't hit an engine, passenger or wheel can be considered to have done largely cosmetic damage, while a HEAP missile that doesn't hit an engine, passenger or wheel will explode and deal avg. 57 DV to each subsystem before armor. (Which in this case will probably reduce the sedan, its engine and its wheels, to a smoldering husk.) A general DUR stat could be given to the chassis for determining whether it's worth trying to repair the car.

A Consortium IFV would have an extremely robust chassis with heavy armour values, but its subsystems would include the turret (also robust and well armoured), the autocannon, coaxial MG, missile launchers, pintle-mounted, remote-controlled machine guns, and tracks.

Whoever are wearing a vehicle as a morph would be fairly well protected from damage to themselves, but would still be at a risk of losing valuable subsystems (such as the loss of an engine meaning that they simply can't move, although they can still do mental or mesh actions without penalty).

While I would love this system as someone who plays wargames that utilize similar mechanics (Battletech, bitches!), I can see how this wouldn't be optimal for making fluid game mechanics for a more casual player. And despite the hard science behind Eclipse Phase, it is a more cinematic-style game, built around faster pacing rather than more realism. Multipliers would be a more quick and dirty system to implement.

For the Innate ability trait, are these skill points that stack on top of the relevant attribute? If not, how would one handle a default to the character's attribute which is higher than the (knowledge or language) skill?

Given that Blisterbots are immobile, should there be negatives or caps on Somatics and/or some of the skills associated with Coordination? Free running and Fray?

Besides, simply reducing DUR doesn't take care of other aspects of vehicles that actually make sense in the Eclipse Phase mechanics. Like the fact that I can't really disable a vehicle easily with melee weapons. At best, even with the best melee weapons that might exist, I'm probably only going to do cosmetic damage unless I can punch through the metal exterior and start cutting through the good stuff. So most non-monofilament melee weaponry should be trivial in anti-vehicle capability at best.

This is a fundamental problem with the Eclipse Phase damage model, and simply boosting armour and DUR won't actually fix that. Because critical hits ignore armour-ratings, you can through a combination of luck and Moxie punch a Reaper to death with your bare hands while sleeved in a Flat - at SOM 35, you can even inflict Wounds.

Decivre wrote:

While I would love this system as someone who plays wargames that utilize similar mechanics (Battletech, bitches!), I can see how this wouldn't be optimal for making fluid game mechanics for a more casual player. And despite the hard science behind Eclipse Phase, it is a more cinematic-style game, built around faster pacing rather than more realism. Multipliers would be a more quick and dirty system to implement.

It's actually not a complex system; instead of the vehicle being your target, you just have the components be your target. The vehicle becomes a set-piece instead of a singe entity. Instead of trying to hit "the vehicle", you try to hit the vehicle's weak spots, which are handled as any other target; a DUR rating, a target size modifier, and an armor rating. The generic EP sedan, for example, could just comprise four identical wheel-motor units with simple stats.

And even more simple way of handling it might be to provide increased support for specific effects and options when dealing with critical hits and called shots. Currently, the called shot rules are vague, nebulous, and very house-rule-ish, and critical hits only affect armor. A more robust, crunchy description of both those mechanics would probably do fine, as the "most simple" method of making it work. The only way to make it really accurate in any sense is probably do something like the subsystems that Latw and I have talked about, but as a simplified method, dealing with called shots and critical hits helps fill in a gap in the system and go a long way toward making vehicles more sane.

—

This isn't a war ordinary humans can win. This is the future. Death's an inconvenience, now. Nothing more.

This is a fundamental problem with the Eclipse Phase damage model, and simply boosting armour and DUR won't actually fix that. Because critical hits ignore armour-ratings, you can through a combination of luck and Moxie punch a Reaper to death with your bare hands while sleeved in a Flat - at SOM 35, you can even inflict Wounds.

Well, luck, Moxie and a likely investment in either SOM or unarmed combat. Even if you are dumping Moxie to convert hits to criticals, you still need to hit in the first place. But using a hand-to-hand weapon against a reaper (assuming said reaper was piloted by someone incompetent or, I don't know... mentally corrupted during their last sleeve?) should still be at least a skosh bit easier than taking down a vehicle Street Fighter bonus level-style. It's the one aspect that the rules somewhat model better (not that the cinematic mechanics of Eclipse Phase are really getting all that close to realism).

Decivre wrote:

It's actually not a complex system; instead of the vehicle being your target, you just have the components be your target. The vehicle becomes a set-piece instead of a singe entity. Instead of trying to hit "the vehicle", you try to hit the vehicle's weak spots, which are handled as any other target; a DUR rating, a target size modifier, and an armor rating. The generic EP sedan, for example, could just comprise four identical wheel-motor units with simple stats.

It isn't complex, but it is more complex. A multiplier would maintain the simplicity of the basic combat system this game has. Subsystems and hit locations do, in fact, add more numbers and complexity to the equation, especially if we then have to figure out what an attack does when it is only generally targeted at the vehicle as a whole (do we do it Battletech-style, and roll for hit location?).

I don't have an issue with the Vehicle morphs as written, present arguments notwithstanding.

Lowering the DUR of vehicles is a bad idea. It unbalances a game where a humanoid BIOMORPH can have DUR 80. Lowering the DUR of vehicles makes the "Cat's vs Whales" conundrum worse.

Instead of demanding a specific list of sub systems for each vehicle it would be easier to just make a standard list of wound effects specific to vehicles in general. Try this;

Spoiler: Highlight to view

Wound 1.
-10 handling
Life & Environmental support compromised will only be effective for 1/2 original durationWound 2.
-20 handling,
Speed (or Delta V for space vehicles) reduced to 75%
life and environmental support will fail imminently, (insert appropriate time factor)Wound 3.
-30 handling,
Speed (or delta V) reduced to 50%,
-10 to all perception tests with vehicle sensors,
-10 to all gunnery tests with vehicle mounted ranged weapons
Radio and sensor range reduced one level,
Life and environmental support systems fail completely.Wound 4.
-40 handling,
Speed (or Delta V) reduced to 25% (flying vehicles in .5G or more land or make crash test.),
-20 to all perception tests,
-20 to all gunnery tests with vehicle mounted ranged weapons
Radio and sensor range reduced two levels, (or non functional)
SPD Attribute of jamming or sleeved ego's reduced by 1,
Armor reduced by 1/2Wound 5.
-50 handling,
Speed reduced to 0 (vehicle is incapable of powered locomotion, flying vehicles make crash test),
-30 to all perception tests,
-30 to all gunnery tests with vehicle mounted ranged weapons
Radio and sensor range reduced 3 levels (or non functional),
SPD attribute of jamming or sleeved egos reduced by 2
Armor reduced to 0

Actually; never mind. forgot that wound penalties will apply to all tests made when sleeved or jamming the vehicle so most of my table is kind of redundant. That simulates things well enough for me without having to writeup sub systems or hit locations for individual vehicles. If you've ever played Rifts you allready know that's a halfassed way of doing things.

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Mea Culpa: My mode of speech can make others feel uninvited to argue or participate. This is the EXACT opposite of what I intend when I post.

Just a couple of thoughts, reading through the Extreme Morphology section:

I find the statement that your average swarmanoid can support three egos or forks somewhat unusual but also not too far fetched. Given the existing and evolution in Eclipse Phase of information splitting and socialist computation algorithms, it seems reasonable to me that users of swarmanoid morphs might have to fork() themselves several times to use all of the morph's processors most efficiently.

I am rather less enthused about the three sub-swarms acting as portions of cortical stacks apiece, but I also do not have better solutions/explanations at this time.

I like the bits about damage to and healing of swarmanoids.

Given that the average swarmanoid is about two thousand microbots, I find the statement on PDF page 4 "Below 0, the primary ego is no longer fully functional and the swarm has been reduced to a few hundred microbots" problematic. The interpretation of the mechanics becomes somewhat problematic. I suggest changing it to refer to a slightly more specific value (300-400 microbots) because I forsee players treating 2,000 as "twenty hundred" and causing hassle for disliked players and NPCs.

I suggest adding rules for microbots linking together into larger modules to more efficiently travel in atmospheric environments (PDF page 4). A swarmanoid turning into a group of centipede-like structures to move through an atmospheless environment seems more reasonable than lots of housefly or hornet-sized microbots having their own rockets or gas thruster packs, the fuel reserves of which would take up a lot of volume proportional to the rest of the microbots' bodies and add additional mass (translating to greater energy consumption for maneuvering).

1) I'm wondering why swarmanoids MUST all be the general size of a small insect.

Is there any way you could create a trait called "larger Swarmanoids" to represent swarms where the individual morphs are more akin to large dung beetles IE scarabs or emperor scorpions, or even robbins or small flocks of birds? and could you take this even farther to represent swarminoids the size of a pony?

I mean if the only limit is the distance the ego signal has to travel, why couldent you have much larger robotic like creatures and with this I think there needs to be a chart that would show the size of the swarmoid and the relitive size of the objects that could be manipulated.

3) I think the swarmorph needs "burrow" as a form of movement for moving within snow, ice, martian soil, etc. and I could see the uses of opening up that movement type to other morphs as well (we got flyers, crawlers, hoppers, etc.. so why not really fast diggers or drillers)

we have the option of cutting tools, why not burrowing lazers or something of that ilk that would allow a swarm to drill a hole in a wall and pass through? It would seem an normal progressive step.

4) is there any reason a swarmorph could not take other traits, drug delivery systems, an acid spray (ala outlander), or have a small nano-canister for releasing nanites of various kinds (if each swarmanoid released a few wouldent that be enough for a game effect?)

maybe these things are already covered, but I'm just getting familiar with the rules... and this is my initial impression...

—

"what do I want? The usual — hundreds of grandchildren, complete dominion over the known worlds, and the pleasure of hearing that all my enemies have died in highly improbable accidents that cannot be connected to me."

Is there any way you could create a trait called "larger Swarmanoids" to represent swarms where the individual morphs are more akin to large dung beetles IE scarabs or emperor scorpions, or even robbins or small flocks of birds? and could you take this even farther to represent swarminoids the size of a pony?

The former might be interesting, but I don't know if it would be trait-worthy...The benefits of being able to have individual units manipulate items would seem to be compensated for by being easier targets (the game now has rules for shooting grenades and seekers out of midair) and not being able to move through as-tiny openings. The latter would probably be most easily statted using the rules for a flexbot with very large members, and would use very different rules-sets from a swarmanoid in terms of damage, manipulation, et al.

Baalbamoth wrote:

we have the option of cutting tools, why not burrowing lazers or something of that ilk that would allow a swarm to drill a hole in a wall and pass through? It would seem an normal progressive step.

This violates the foundation idea of the swarmanoid not being able to manipulate tools. Undoubtedly someone will try to rules lawyer it into: if you can give every swarmanoid a laser, why can't they combine their power to become a beam weapon? But I'm not all that keen on the idea of them being given cutting tools, either. A big part of the swarmanoid is it's effective combat-immateriality...Very difficult to affect/destroy, but also unable to directly participate in offensive combat. Taking away either of those significantly impacts what the morph is and how it interacts with the game, IMHO.

Baalbamoth wrote:

is there any reason a swarmorph could not take other traits, drug delivery systems, an acid spray (ala outlander), or have a small nano-canister for releasing nanites of various kinds (if each swarmanoid released a few wouldent that be enough for a game effect?)

I'd actually be more inclined to permit something like drug-delivery systems (and use a toxin-type drug-delivery system to mimic the effects of acid spray). Additionally, a swarmanoid could certainly be accompanied by actual nanites (even nanites hitching a ride on the swarmanoid bugs, which are hundreds to thousands of times the size of true nano). A swarmanoid could also easily program swarms on the fly, but getting them to accompany it would probably rely on them being able to hitch-hike on the swarm itself, due to how slowly nano moves. At that point, you just use standard injector nanites (or whatever works best for the effect you want).

I note the following from the new rules draft:

Quote:

Microbots may also be equipped with specialized equipment. Because of their size, microbots cannot sustain most cybernetic enhancements or nanoswarm modifications. Tools, weapons, and implants must be sized appropriately, and sufficiently energy-efficient for microbots to use them effectively. Implants that are too heavy, such as a single venom syringe, will reduce the speed of the swarmanoid until those modified microbots are removed.

that just irks me to no end, a large swarm of bees and other insects can already kill a human in a matter of seconds, heck I lived in Alaska, you know what kills more people than bears, sharks, snakes, spiders, tigers or any other animal on the planet? friggin mosquitos, up to a million people a year.

—

"what do I want? The usual — hundreds of grandchildren, complete dominion over the known worlds, and the pleasure of hearing that all my enemies have died in highly improbable accidents that cannot be connected to me."

Actually, I think both should apply. Vehicles have such a high DUR, because they can take a lot of damage from environmental effects and because it will take forever to reduce one to scrap with a slug thrower or something similar. And even a slug thrower will simply pierce most parts of a vehicle, except battery, engine, etc. depending on vehicle type.
But a HEAP minimissile is something different, because it's meant to toast armoured targets, not to mention unarmoured ones.

LatwPIAT wrote:

It's actually not a complex system; instead of the vehicle being your target, you just have the components be your target. The vehicle becomes a set-piece instead of a singe entity. Instead of trying to hit "the vehicle", you try to hit the vehicle's weak spots, which are handled as any other target; a DUR rating, a target size modifier, and an armor rating. The generic EP sedan, for example, could just comprise four identical wheel-motor units with simple stats.

Your mechanics are generally very simple, but the actual application would not necessarily be, I think, because you would have to either:

1. describe for each and every vehicle what subsystems it has - which would be tedious and a waste of paper (of bits);
2. have generic subsystems that apply for every vehicle - which would not make sense given the wide variety of vehicles;
3. Let each group discuss the subsystems of the vehicle - which will lead to never-ending discussion

So, I would go for the simpler version of a damage multiplier for some weapon groups.